[Ed P]

blacklion1725 wrote:

On the USB DVD – you’d get a “normal” DVD Player for£20 PM – maybe be easier for your mum?

‘I’d check that ou before spending cash. Some usb connections will not do anything except play media which is actually on the  on the USB. It should give that info in the manual.

[Ed P]

When it comes to what you actually pay, you may get a fair-sized reduction if you agree to have a black-box spy installed to monitor your driving. I believe Drezha initially had one of these so he may be able to give his experiences. It probably (not certain) may be advisable to fit a traffic camera as well to ‘prove your innocence’ in 50:50 cases.

[Ed P]

As Steve says those who learned all had both different motivations, experience and background. I had a little background through college and the days of ‘steam’ computers (A donated Lyons Corner House mainframe), but computers in those days were far too big and expensive for individuals. I coveted the first single board computers when they started to come on the matket but could not afford them . I finally spent the equivalent of a second-hand car on an Apple IIe, and that was when I really started.

My first foray was actually a somewhat illegal hack.

An Apple game I had purchased stopped working so I delved into the file structure and machine code (Apple in those days fully documented everything), and identified that Apple had used a simple XOR rotating word encryption on the file, once the 6502 machine code was revealed it did nor take too long to identify the file corruption and fix it.I saw nothing illegal in what I had done and even wrote a magazine article (never published for now obvious reasons).

Under today’s draconian Millennium laws  all that would now be completely illegal and I would have lost a great learning experience. However, from there it was a short step to wanting to write my own ‘cargo-cult’ arcade games versions a bit like TL’s foray into BombJack.

I think the keys to learning to program are having an objective that is reasonably achievable, plus laziness. Always pinch and adapt code snippets where possible .Other people invariably write better code than a noob, but a lot can be learned from understanding what they have done.

[Ed P]

Cider can be exceptionally ‘lethal’ due to its high potassium content and impact on folk taking ACE inhibitors. Getting paralytic may then become a fact rather than a metaphor.

[edit] I think I must have had too much last night as I’m getting ‘Blue Flashes’ whenever I post.?

[Ed P]

Just to add to the talk on Insurance, where you live and what you do are also hugely important. For example anyone with an Aldershot address is hugely disadvantaged versus the almost contiguous Farnham. Similar disparities apply to jobs. IIRC Reporters are weighted out of sight compared with Teachers.

[Ed P]

I think if there WAS any market manipulation, US law will take care of them for a long time!

I must admit that other than watching ‘Billion’s on Sky, market manipulation investigations are a bit of a Black Box to me. If (say) someone spotted something awry 24 months ago and look out a long-term short, and later tipped off a reporter, would market investigators pick it up, or do they only look at recent trades?

[Ed P]

Thanks Dave looks good, but I do not see the ‘cashback’! Registered customers only I guess.

Correction, now the green cashback shows – very strange!

Order placed with delivery tomorrow – great start.

[Ed P]

Having just read how Bloomberg rewards its reporters maybe there is a degree of self-interest in the way the SuperMicro article was pitched.

Bloomberg Reporters Bonus Calculation

[Ed P]

I envy you guys – age has taken its toll. Just one bottle of Dave’s favourite tipple is enough for me to realise that I just cannot take it any more!

[Ed P]

This has unnecessarily become a little heated. Although I can see both sides points of view, (I just dislike Political Kommissars) I think there has been a little misunderstanding of positions on all sides. May I respectfully suggest that we draw a line under this thread.

[Ed P]

A friend pointed me to a snapshot printer he uses:  the Kodak Photo Printer Dock PD-450 – it certainly gives a nice quality snapshot print.

[Ed P]

tadka wrote:

Richard wrote:

To be fair, (I hate being fair) they do say 8 ~ 20 characters. Some people have pet phrases that they use to generate a password and make it easier to remember the code, it could be a poem, a bit of a nursery rhyme, or something more personal- ‘I hate Mondays/shopping/putrid_transport’! etc with letters plucked from the words, e.g I2_aohu!. Some people go extreme, hence the maximum length rule. Most sites do require special characters, a number or two and usually a capital letter. There is a lot of personalisation possible. Many sites appear to have the same or very similar rules engines grafted into their offering. I changed my router password and now it thinks the original one they applied is crap being too short, too easy, etc. in which cases why did they choose it in the first place?

This is the second time this year they are forcing me to change my password. I wouldn’t mind so much if I could just leave it as it is, eventually I would remember. But I just can’t keep up anymore.

You may have a cause for concern, unless everyone is getting the same request. It could be that your account has been the subject of detected attacks. Perhaps you have used this card with one of the companies known to have been lax with customer info.  (lots of them, so I will not attempt to list)

[Ed P]

Richard I actually wasn’t  deliberately changing focus. When this was raised with my local Kommissar there was no awareness of cross-county crime extending to children trafficking drugs, that is as you said is a relatively recent development.  The Home Counties police focus at that time was on ‘reverse commuting’ burglars, mainly using the train services to cross county boundaries so avoiding ANPR. In fact one complaint was that unlike the Police, criminals did not respect county or Police boundaries!

[Ed P]

@Graham the Bloomberg report is light on tech details but it isn’t a tech mag. Try the Cambridge Uni assessment for more detailed chip tech assumptions. Having referred you to the link, I would say that actual mobos with identified  rogue chips seem to be significant in their absence. So a fair summary would be that  tainted mobos are  technically feasible; but as yet unproven to exist .

Incidentally from the tech description, tainted GPUs would be the way to go!

Meanwhile Supermicro stock is down 30%.

[Ed P]

I guess it depends what you mean by crime across county lines being a recent development. The Home Counties Chief Constables were talking about it ten years ago when May threw her tantrums and started the savage Police cuts.  It has grown since then: in fact burglary has even been recently outsourced to Chileans!

[Ed P]

Richard, following Stuxnet, and Snowden’s revelations I am willing to believe that nation states are inclined to do anything they think could gain them advantages even if it means possibly  hitting the innocent as well. For example the side-effects of  Stuxnet, and the NSA hacking tools and maybe even the Intel Management Engine (IME) ….

It is a published ‘fact’ that the NSA has intercepted hardware during its shipment to bug it  As the Chinese have access at the point of manufacture it is much easier to taint a manufacturing ‘batch’ destined for large target orders, if a few also get out into the wild, so be it. It depends very much  on the function of the chip. In a ‘Crash & Burn’ application, collateral victims are acceptable. In a Command & Control/Communications situation I would accept that a more fine-grained distribution is needed. Certainly one of the NSA tools (IME?) can be used in a malign ‘Crash & Burn’ mode (Snowden), it would be foolish to overrule similar hardware devices.

[Ed P]

dwynnehugh wrote:

I’m not really 100% certain that cuts in the police forces can be laid at the doors of the PCCs – in the main police funding comes from the Home Office / Treasury etc. and it is they who decide what the total police budget / force is set at with a contribution from local taxpayers.

You are of course correct. However from my interrogation of our local (useless) Tory Kommissar they are not allowed to determine HOW these cuts are made. Despite most modern crime being across County lines they are not allowed to discuss using force regionalisation as a way of both cutting crime and budgets. When I pressed and said ‘Why are you not publicly lamenting this position on Press and TV?’, I received a shrug in reply.

As I said – democracy at its worst. (I’m very tempted to spell it East German style)

[Ed P]

While I agree regular communication would likely be detected, a ‘Crash & Burn’ scenario a la Stuxnet would only need a couple of incoming double words to act as an authorising activation signal to set off the self destruct code for the board. For example. a recursive delete on the board’s Linux.boot code, but as quoted this hypothetical chip has full access to the memory space for the board so just adding a little random operating ‘noise’ would generate the nightmare of intermittent faults.

[Ed P]

There are reports that the update to release 1809 can in some cases cause all personal files to be purged. A full backup before doing this update may be wise.

That said I have updated a vm clone of my system to 180928 with no loss of data. A couple of caveats.

a) I always update from an Admin account that has NO data files, all such files are in the user account.

b) For ease, my vm does NOT completely replicate my physical system which has all data files on a data disk. So my test result may be due to the simpler disk config.

One other observation I’ll make. I found that I previously had to remove Java from my test and physical system as Java updates caused horrible clashes with windows Insider updates. For my purposes it was easier to zap java, which in any case has a less than stellar security reputation (Java is only run when required within vms..)

[edit] Following these reports M$ has suspended the release of the October update to 1809.

 

 

[Ed P]

For what it is worth a Cambridge University Senior Associate has made an assessment of the Bloomberg story, and states that from a technical standpoint it is very plausible.

In other words such a chip attack could be made and it would work. This then leaves the ‘conspiracy’ of just why tech companies would deny it.

Assuming the story is true the only reason would be collusion while a technical solution could be found to the problem of replacing thousands of vulnerable servers. (a bit like their concealing of the Meltdown vulnerability for as long as possible.)

If the story is wrong we can all breathe a sigh of relief at not having to worry about an army of script kiddies writing SPI code and exploiting the thousands of severs we use every day.

[Author]

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